Every once in a while you need to stop looking at the big picture and focus on the little things. Here's some little things that recently caught our attention:

The scoop : Laptop Legs, about $20, from LapWorks

What it does: If you're looking to elevate your notebook PC to let it cool down or even improve typing ergonomics but don't want to buy an expensive separate laptop stand, then these plastic laptop legs might be just the solution. By placing two of them on the bottom of your notebook, you can elevate the back up by 1 or 1.5 inches to let hot air from the notebook escape or let cool air in.

Why it's cool : The legs have adhesive that stick to your notebook, so you don't have to bring a separate notebook stand when you're traveling. These also are probably the most inexpensive way to help dissipate heat from the notebook that we've seen (other than trying to create your own notebook stand).

Some caveats : If you use your notebook with a docking station, you might encounter some problems with the placement of the Laptop Legs. On our Compaq Evo notebook, we discovered that the back of it was exactly where the Laptop Legs were placed, preventing us from connecting to the docking station until we removed the legs.

Grade:      (if you don't use a docking station)

The scoop: D-Skin disc protectors, about $6 for a 5-pack, from D-Skin

 What it does: The D-Skin is a thin, circular plastic protector that you can clip onto a CD or DVD and provide instant scratch protection. Once connected, the D-Skin stays on the disc, even while it is being played. The disc is readable through the protector so data quality is unaffected.

Why it's cool: Sometimes the easiest solution is the coolest. We normally don't think about disc protection, and then we get an inevitable scratch on a CD, DVD or video game disc so we must go find a scratch cleaner. With the D-Skin, we could add that layer of protection so we wouldn't get a scratch in the first place. We tried these on different video game systems, DVD players and computers, and the disc played correctly each time, with no interference from the D-Skin protector. Prevention is sometimes the best protection.

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The scoop : Monstor 2G-byte USB drive, about $100, from US Modular

What it does: The Monstor is about the size of those old pagers/beepers (remember those?) and contains a hard drive with 2G bytes of capacity (a 4G-byte model is available for about $170). The drive connects via a USB 2.0 or 1.1 port to a PC and lets you transfer any type of file over to the device.

Why it's cool: There's nothing earth-shattering here in terms of new features or abilities (there's no back-up software provided or anything like that). The cool part is its price - $100 for 2G bytes on a flash drive is pretty special - similar drives can cost up to $230 for 2G bytes. Having USB 2.0 on the drive also lets you transfer lots of files fast - we transferred 89 songs (about 300M bytes) to a USB 2.0-enabled laptop in less than 2 minutes.

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Shaw can be reached at kshaw@nww.com.